Bilbo
by Rosabell
Summary: John learns of a new obstacle, but fighting it might not be worth it.
1. Prologue

It hit him suddenly, like the bullet to his shoulder. He had a chance to call out "Sarah!" before the rest of his energy was consumed by just breathing. The thud of his heart pounded in his ears, _buh buh buh_, at least twice per second if not more, and he was gasping like a fish, an invisible vice around his chest, squeezing. Tachycardia, tachypnea, and angina.

Sarah rang for the ambulance while asking him all the questions John had already asked himself: _any radiation? Any diaphroesis? _She felt along his forehead, but his skin was dry, and his left shoulder and arm were fine—not that it meant anything. She asked him other questions that she knew the answers to: any recent surgery, any existing medical problems; no, and no. No smoking, and John did not drink often. No drugs. No family history of heart attacks, at all. He was just sitting, logging his progress note in the chart when it started. Not likely a heart attack.

She echoed his thoughts. "Not likely an MI. Is it severe?"

Oh yes. He was willing to say that it hurt more than the bullets did, because at least he had the adrenaline, various tricks of his nervous system to make him notice less of the pain. Pain was, after all, a message from the body announcing that it had been hurt, and there were ways to muffle it, to silence it for a time. Now, whatever this was, his body was not shutting up.

_For crying out loud, stop._

Triage pushed him to the front of the list at the hospital, bypassing the normal five-hour wait in the ER. A nurse quickly checked his vitals: Temperature was 97.6 (normal), heart rate 136 (high), respiratory rate 31 (high), blood pressure 138/86 (normal), and oxygen saturation of 82% (low).

They put him on nasal cannula oxygen and ordered an EKG, which was normal, drew blood for his complete blood count and basic metabolic panel, which showed a bicarb of 30 (high). They did an echocardiogram, which showed nothing, and the attending, working on a hunch, wanted a CT-angiography, already starting the paperwork for his admission. He ordered an IV dose of heparin for anticoagulation, and by the time John was wheeled away from the CT rooms, he was already feeling better.

"But you run after Sherlock Holmes all the time," Sarah shook her head, "You haven't gone on any road trips, or flights, and you don't have any clotting disorders." She had already guessed what the attending was thinking, just as John did.

"It's a classic presentation though," John reminded her, "other than the no recent surgery or travel, or medical problem."

"But what else causes a pulmonary embolism?"

Sherlock arrived after John was already admitted, settling in with his heparin drip and a nurse establishing an arterial line in case of emergencies. In all the commotion, John had forgotten to text him, as did Sarah. How he figured out in the first place was a mystery, but John had long since learned not to question such things.

"I honestly thought Mycroft would be in this situation rather than you," he said without preamble.

Brusque and almost inconsiderate. John was use to worse, though, and at this point he could even make his own leaps further ahead of his flatmate. _Mycroft, fat, likely hypercholesterolemia; Sherlock thinks this is a heart attack. _"This has nothing to do with my diet or exercise."

"Of course not," Sherlock followed his lead, "you eat the same things I do and you're only three years older than me. So what is this, some kind of inherent propensity, lousy genetics, sudden fright?"

The oxygen released a loud puff, and John glared, feeling rather silly with the nasal cannula wrapped around his face. The air made his nostrils dry, and he really wished he could take it off without feeling short of breath.

"I'd think I would have been here sooner if it were a case of being _scared_," he rolled his eyes for good measure. "I'm not fucking eighty. The answer is: I don't know. We need more data. They're going to do an abdominal CT in a bit."

"What for? The problem is in your _chest_."

"Surely you must have realized by now that the human body is not divided into exclusive compartments," John returned dryly.

Sarah answered, "They're checking for malignancy, which could cause a pulmonary embolism—what he has. John's thrown a clot in his lungs."

"Waste of time and money," Sherlock rolled his eyes. "Cancer would have caused weight loss, at the very least."

"Except when it doesn't," John replied, though he agreed.

"This is most inconvenient," Sherlock complained, "Lestrade just dropped off a case and you had to throw a clot in your lungs."

"I'm so very sorry that a clot mysteriously showed up in my lungs and kept me from helping Your Highness." Still, he was interested. "What's he got now?"

While Sarah excused herself to the bathroom, Sherlock started explaining the newest case.

* * *

><p>The abdominal CT took about three hours because of the queue. British healthcare lagged whenever something was not an emergency, and screening for cancer was not urgent. John thought he would not receive the results until he was discharged, but the primary team came in the morning and told him of the impressions. The attending, Dr. Rose, who knew John was also a doctor, even printed out the image to display the white lesions climbing up near the stomach.<p>

"This makes no sense," John shook his head as he stared at the findings. "Are you sure they didn't mix me up with someone else?"

He had no jaundice. He had no nausea or vomiting. Before his chest pain, he had been perfectly fine. No fevers or chills. No change in bowel movement. This was ridiculous.

"We can give them a call," said Rose, "but it fits the pulmonary embolism."

The team left John feeling stunned and dismayed.

Late in the morning, they wheeled him to the PET scan. Afterwards, Sherlock visited, but John did not tell him about the study; it would have clued him in. The detective ranted about the case again, and how absolutely unhelpful John was being—just like him to show how much he cared by being completely callous.

The PET scan was read quite quickly, faster than John expected. Later, after Sherlock left, the surgical attending popped by, hair like Sherlock's, but his face was rounder, like a doll's. He wore teal scrubs with a mask hanging around his neck and blue shoe covers over his sneakers. He also knew John was a doctor and surgeon once, and cut to the chase since he expected John to already know everything.

"It's at the head," he said to him, "but from the images it actually looks encapsulated, almost. You ever do one of those before?"

"I've done at least a hundred back when I was training," John managed not to snap. "I've done two of them back to back in one day!"

The surgeon winced. "Ooh. I would never schedule _that_. Anyway, you in?"

John looked at him, a fit man with firm, toned arms and towering high above where Sherlock would have been. Some Italian blood, from the looks of the skin, with fine long hands tipped with short fingernails. John was thrust back to when he had donned such scrubs, a cap over his head, looking at the MRI films, the boards with the OR schedule of the day, washing his hands and forearms, practicing knots, palpating abdomens for tenderness—so many patients, with puffy bellies tied together in stitches, lying there, helpless and miserable.

"Uh," he said to the surgeon, "let me think about it?"

And the surgeon knew where his mind went. "Sure. I'll write you in for Tuesday two weeks from now anyway, but you let me know what you decide."

* * *

><p>Back when John was a medical student, there was one week when he had three patients die on his team's service. They were an inpatient medicine service, which meant long walking rounds and presentations consisting of everything from a patient's itch to the long list of differentials that were unlikely, and yet still must be mentioned. John had already fallen in love with surgery, the brisk, to-the-point rounds that consisted of "is the patient dying? No? Advance diet," and cutting things in the OR to the tune of the Beatles and dirty jokes between the surgeon and the nurse. He hated medicine and hated medicine rounds, because they were so long, loquacious, and <em>boring<em>.

But medicine was a basic field, and he learned a lot while on that clerkship, especially that week. His first patient was a 74-year-old male with stage IV chronic kidney disease on hemodialysis, intubated and demented. The problem was that the man had so much other shit going on, such as hepatitis and congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, that every time he went down to dialysis, the blood pressure drop would provoke cardiac arrest. He was full code, which meant they had to do all the resuscitation, until at one point they were at it for an hour and the doctor in charge finally called it.

Afterwards, while the family grieved, John heard the nurses and some of the attendings complain to each other about the "fucking morons, forcing him to go through this." The folks in dialysis were also furious, exclaiming "We _told _the primaries that he's not fit for dialysis." John's attending had to sit with the family for a long time, explaining what had happened, and everyone was in a mood because if the man's family had just let him go, he could have died with less fuss and fewer cracked ribs.

That evening, his team admitted a 98-year-old woman with Alzheimer's with severe dehydration and a urinary tract infection. She was a "hummer", as they called it, wordlessly singing random melodies as she looked around the room without recognition. The cause of her dehydration was poor food intake, or more accurately, _no _food intake, because the lady refused to eat because she was demented, and her children asked the doctors to place a peg tube—then a relatively new operation—once the infection cleared.

They had less data about these things back then, so the primary team consulted the surgeons, who followed through and placed a peg tube in her. Not too long after, the elderly woman started screaming incessantly, to the point where they had to sedate her with haloperidol. She began clawing at herself, and managed, with a surprising feat of strength, to rip the peg tube out of her stomach before they could place her in restraints.

That did not end well for her.

But as traumatic as that was for John, the worst case was the last one, 41-year-old male, 5'10" and 76 kilograms, pancreatic cancer, status post Whipple Procedure one year ago, with a giant jagged scar on his belly to prove it. Not that it did him any good, because it was detected again, this time in his liver, his spine, and three rock-hard palpable nodes right above his clavicles. He had six bowel obstructive episodes over the past year because of the surgery. They thought he was having another, but when John saw him, his belly protruded like he was 8 months pregnant, full of fluid, his skin was a bright, glowing gold, and his ankles were like clay, keeping the imprint of John's finger for a whole ten seconds. He was in so much pain, he could barely talk, and his wife and child could barely talk either.

They gave him a whopping load of dilaudid, but he went into respiratory failure the next morning, and coded before they could transfer him to the intensive care unit. They could not resuscitate him.

Pancreatic cancer was like that. Struts around as if perfectly fine, and then _whoosh_, gone.

"Mike," John said afterwards, when he shared these stories with his classmate, "I want to cut people. I want to sew, to do all of that stuff instead of standing around and talking. But I am _not _going to undergo surgery, for _anything._ If I need to be on dialysis, just let me die. _Especially _if I'm already demented. If I get cancer, just give me lots of dilaudid. Give me like, a hundred packs of them, and twenty pills of Xanax."

"You want to write that in your will?"

John, of course, did undergo surgery later. There was no way to talk a bullet out of one's body, or to lecture a wound closed. Yet he always knew that when the time came to it, he would not try to postpone death. It boggled him, why people would go through such lengths, such suffering, just to stick around to be burdens to other people. As a childless bachelor with few friends and a sister already on her way to being a drunkard, John Watson saw no reason for such lunacy. Quick, sudden, in an unknown land far away from home, when without the bullet he would have been fit and fine—yes, he wanted to live, please, God, let him live. But if his body and mind were already failing, if all survival meant was more machines, more pills, more pain…

What would he go through that for?

* * *

><p>He could breathe. He could run.<p>

He tried pushups when he got home. Twenty-five with one arm, though he was out of shape from civilian life. Not a problem.

_Denial._

"Don't touch those!" Sherlock yelled as he entered the room, and John looked reflexively at the kitchen, which he had actually avoided. "Those need to sit for at least two more hours. I'm going to look at them when we come back."

He visited John as the latter was being released from the hospital. John had done his best to appear casual, and even Sherlock, the brilliant observer that he was, could not see everything while he was distracted. The new case was frustrating yet puzzling, and Sherlock spent most of the time talking through it to John, his observations, his deductions, Anderson's incompetency, Lestrade's long-suffering.

"…drunkard, of course, his phone looked exactly like yours even though it was only bought two months ago. Likes to visit the Starbucks on eleventh street based on the smell of his clothes…"

John had breathed, for the first time hardly listening. He was thinking, not about himself or his figure, but about Sherlock. His eagerness for intellectual stimulation, enthusiasm over puzzles, rejection of sentiment or anything else that could hinder one's logic.

_Ordinary man…_John thought to himself, _no accomplishments to speak of, except making this one amazing friend. That's an accomplishment, no?_

He reflected on their adventures as Sherlock took a seat in his armchair. "Go make some tea, will you?" his request butted in. John rose to his feet before his mind even wrapped around the question—more of a command, really. Suddenly, he was remembering a Chinese family he had once taken care of as a surgeon before he went to the army; a mother was dying from heart failure, and the daughter had given up work to take care of her. Bedpans, blankets, washclothes, combs. The mother was thin, but the daughter actually seemed thinner. Tired. Stretched, like Bilbo from Lord of the Rings, functional but exhausted, depleted, hopeless and desperate. She had lost her job to take care of the mother, and when the patient finally passed away, the young woman wept in that stuffy room with blue curtains and fake flowers, wishing she had done more. Wishing that she had not been so tired that she was half-praying for her mother to die and find release so she could finally rest herself, and then regretting that wish, deep remorse and guilt, because she was such a bad daughter that she had wished her own mother to die. 5'2" and maybe 39 kilos at most, she was a pretty woman,or at least would have been if taking care of her mother had not aged her so. Thirty years old, looking like fifty. That was dramatic, for an Asian. What was the mother, 55? History of GERD, osteoarthritis—

"What are you doing?" Sherlock suddenly asked.

John looked up. He had been standing in front of the stove for a long time, pot in hand. He placed it on the stove and turned the stove on.

"Sorry. Brain's not working quite right yet."

He saw Sherlock give him a considering look, but did not acknowledge it.

* * *

><p>He was sitting at the café across the surgery when Mycroft slid into the seat across from home. John continued staring down at his coffee. He did not want to go back to the surgery yet.<p>

"I was expecting you to stop working," the elder Holmes said softly.

John shrugged. It figured that Mycroft already knew. Probably had his people hack into the hospital files or something. Him being the British Government was very annoying, but it was not like John could do anything about it. Especially not now.

"Sarah knows. I need to sign off on my patients though."

There was a long pause. John took a sip of his coffee. He had gotten it black, no sugar. God, that was bitter.

"Sherlock doesn't know," Mycroft remarked.

"He's been a little busy with his case."

"Are you planning to tell him?"

John finally looked him in the eye. "Let me guess. If I don't, you will."

Mycroft splayed his hands out, palm upwards. "This is entirely your decision, Doctor. However, I should warn you that my brother will not take it well either way. He is likely to be even more displeased if you do choose to withhold this from him."

John grinned. "Look at you. 'Displeased'. You're so funny."

Mycroft was still wearing his long grey coat. He stared back at John, silent, his face absent of any mirth.

John looked out the window. London bustled, busy as ever. Bright blonde hair went briskly past, atop high heeled boots. A dog, a black labrador. A few sparrows. A brunette in a parka.

"I haven't even made my decision yet," he said.

"What's keeping you?"

"It's a big procedure," John replied, "for a small guarantee."

John would know.

"You ever did it yourself?"

"Oh, yes. At least a hundred. Once back to back, and they both lasted over ten hours. My sneakers were good but…my feet were still aching two days later."

"What are the odds of surviving?"

"Depends."

Mycroft waited, feeling it unnecessary to prod.

"Stage I was 25-30%. It gets worse as you go on. Plus there's chemo."

"What stage are you?"

"Stage IIB. Not sure what kind it is, not that any of them are good."

Mycroft frowned. "Why are you so unwilling to find out?"

John shrugged. He sipped his coffee again.

"I often thought I should have died in Afghanistan," he confessed. "Didn't really understand why I survived. Can't even do surgery, after that. You see a lot of death when you're a doctor. My first year on the wards, I saw five deaths myself. It's the dying process that is scarier, not the end of it. When you're dead, you're dead," he leaned back, "and the ones you leave behind are the ones that grieve. But if you try to survive, you deny it, you're in denial, you reach for that 25% possibility that you'll live, combined with the 40% possibility that the remainder of your life will be shit and you'd spend most of it in a hospital hooked onto a ventilator with a crash cart on standby, you can't talk, you can't move, you can't be bothered to learn what's going on beyond you, and you're almost unconscious with dilaudid, and then they give you miralax to make you shit, your abdomen's a huge bruise because they give you heparin shots, your creatinine bumps and then they pump you full of fluids to protect your kidneys—" he cut himself off for a moment. "I wouldn't come out of it ready to run behind Sherlock on cases, Mycroft. Chances are, I'd be even more crippled than I am now." He looked up at Mycroft. "I once asked God to let me live. He's shown me what it could mean. Ultimately, Sherlock saved me," at this, he smiled, "but he won't be able to save me from this."

"'Chances are'. 'Possibility'. You're talking all about the worst case scenarios," Mycroft pointed out.

"I've seen enough that I don't want to take that chance," John replied. "Pancreatic cancer is a bad cancer. One of the worst, if not _the _worst. But it lets you live your life before it kills you," he nodded. "Painkillers don't always work when the end comes, in fact, they rarely do. Your body screams at you that something's wrong," he smiled again, "but compared to the slow deaths many other cancers cause, pancreatic cancer is merciful. I'd be able to run behind Sherlock all the way up until the end. Be like that awful cabbie," at this, he had to suppress a chuckle, "and continue driving around, working. No one would really know. And I want that, you know? I don't want to waste time, waste life, going through all these drugs, losing my hair, feeling like shit. I want to enjoy life while I still have it, and I want to enjoy it with Sherlock. I don't want him mourning me before I'm already dead."

"You might not die," Mycroft insisted, and John realized that for all his passive demeanor, the elder Holmes was scared. "You can go through with the Whipple. They could take all the cancer out."

"Not likely," John stated. "They only saw one lymph node, but I had a PE, Mycroft. That usually comes late in cancer."

"You usually have symptoms before you have a PE."

"True." So Mycroft had been reading up on this. John had to smile. The British Government was looking up on his well-being. That had a certain humor to it. "But PE's are bad, Mycroft." He looked aside. "In retrospect, I probably should have let that kill me now, instead of waiting for death later. It's going to be really bad. I better be unconscious for most of it."

He was not going through the Whipple, John knew. Even though the surgeon still had him on the schedule, John was going to say no. He was already looking ahead to how it will be as he lay on his deathbed. Probably a belly as ballooned as his former patients, reclining like an asshole and totally high on opiates. Dilaudid and Benadryl. That was what the malingerers liked to have. He could try it and see what the fuss was all about. He wasn't able to last time.

Today was Friday. He had one week and four days to call. He will call tonight.

Mycroft looked aside. "Sherlock calls himself a 'highly functioning sociopath'." He looked back at John. "The truth is, Sherlock feels too much. If you do this, John, it will kill him."

The words provoked a sliver of doubt in John's heart.

"He's done fine before he met me," he pointed out.

"Just think about it," Mycroft said, instead of answering.

* * *

><p>John smiled and made tea and made phone calls to doctors he had referred his patients to. He checked his email and wrote in his blog, agreed to go with Sherlock to examine the park and local stores like he usually did. Somehow, Sherlock still figured out something was wrong.<p>

True to form, the way he announced this was to turn to John as they were heading home and asking, "What's wrong with you?"

"What's wrong with _you_?" John stared at him, putting on his best incredulous mask. He was a doctor. He knew how to act. It was half of the job these days.

"Don't try," and Sherlock scowled, "you've been acting off ever since the hospital. Pulmonary embolism. They did a cat scan. What did it show?"

'Nothing,' John wanted to say. 'Everything's normal'. Except when it came down to it, he could not lie to Sherlock, even if the man could not smell a lie from halfway across the world.

"This is not the place for this conversation," he said at last.

"Tell me," Sherlock demanded, as impatient as ever, but John had a stubborn will of his own.

"We should get back first. _I _need to sit down for this." Because in the end, John was not sure how Sherlock would react. Apathetic? Perhaps not. John had taught him better than that by now. Falsely sympathetic?

He made tea first, much to Sherlock's frustration. It was not until they were both sitting with the cups in hand; Sherlock's knee bouncing up and down like it were being tased—that John began.

"They found a mass," he told Sherlock, "at the head of the pancreas. It's a tumor, and it's spread to one node. Stage IIB, we call it."

Sherlock did not really have a face for complete shock. It was more the lack of movement, how his face really looked like marble, and his eyes became more vivid, focused, but without calculation.

"Is surgery an option?" he asked.

"It's a bad option," John replied.

"Why is it bad?"

"Because the surgery is a complicated procedure. Pancreaticoduodectomy, or 'Whipple procedure'. It involves slicing off part of the stomach, duodenum, bile duct and gall bladder, along with the head of the pancreas. It's risky, it's got a high rate of complications, and you might live for five years if you're lucky."

"When are you going to do it?"

John hesitated. Despite having his doubts before, he could not deny that his next words would provoke a shitstorm. "I'm not."

Sherlock paused for a full five seconds. It was the longest five seconds of John's life—this must be how Sherlock felt when everyone else was trying to think.

"What?" he demanded.

* * *

><p>Sherlock had been mean, callous, inconsiderate, and annoyed before. He had never been angry at John, as far as John could remember.<p>

There was a lot of yelling.

"You're just looking at all the negative things that can happen!" Sherlock spat while he pointed vehemently at the computer screen. "Look, the Americans—Johns Hopkins posted that survivors rate a 79 out of 100 in terms of how well they can function!"

"Sherlock—"

"They slice and they sew and that's that! You've been operated on before! What's the difference?"

"Sherlock, I've _done _these procedures. I've taken care of patients afterwards—"

"Well of _course _you're only going to see how they suffer—people don't come to the hospital if they're doing well!"

"I do happen to follow-up on my patients as well, thank you—"

"No, you're just scared," Sherlock turned to him with his eyes blazing, "I never thought you were a _coward_, John Watson! You never seemed this pathetic—"

John was done listening to him. He turned and retreated to his bedroom, slamming the door closed.

* * *

><p>He stared up at his ceiling from his bed, looking at the various cracks in the paint. An hour and a half passed before Sherlock opened his door without knocking. John was about to tell him to piss off, but Sherlock was subdued this time. Maybe they could have a proper conversation, like adults.<p>

He did not realize how much he was fuming until Sherlock's words took it out.

"I don't want you to die."

The remark, considering the person speaking and the circumstances, was actually rather inane. Stupid enough that John knew just how much it took for Sherlock to vocalize that simple thought. He looked over at his flatmate.

"The Whipple's not necessarily going to save me."

"I know," Sherlock wavered. He was still fully dressed, John noted; he had not changed out of his clothes, only putting his coat and scarf on the hanger.

"I cheated death many times already," John pointed out, "at least for this one, I get to say goodbye."

Sherlock clenched his teeth. "I am prepared…" he inhaled coarsely, "I am prepared to fight for you. Every step of the way. I will do that. I will pour everything I've got. As long as you do it too."

John sat up at this. He knew a vow when he heard it. Sherlock's eyes glittered at him, glossy with desperation.

"Five years," he said softly, "One year's not even a good chance. And all the while, I would be living a pale imitation of a life. I wouldn't be able to help you on cases. I would probably be sick all the time. I use to tell patients with relatives who have this cancer to book them trips around the world. Let them get totally wasted. Live life to the fullest. Don't bother with chemo."

"I don't care about the cases."

John looked away. "I'll drag you along with me. You're underestimating what this is."

"I know exactly what this is. You're afraid of losing, so you're giving up now. That's cowardly of you."

"It's not a question of giving up, Sherlock. The battle's already over."

"No it isn't! You said this was operable!"

"And the operation does jack!"

"No it doesn't! It certainly gives you more of a chance than you do without it!"

"It's not meaningful, Sherlock!"

"It is to me!"

John stared at him, stunned beyond words.

In two strides, Sherlock was upon him, hands cupping the sides of his head and his own face close, eyes right in front of his. Ludicrously, the words _I'm **not **gay_ echoed in his brain, but they washed away with the intensity of Sherlock's words.

"Every minute counts to me," he whispered, the voiceless words like a scream. "Every minute counts. Please. You haven't lost yet. We haven't lost yet. You're not dead yet, and you can live. Every second counts. You can't give up."

* * *

><p>Cancer liked to metastasize to the spine, so when a 36-year-old Russian woman with squamous cell lung cancer with established metastases to the liver showed up, weeping due to severe upper back pain that radiated to her arms, they did a STAT MRI of her thoracic spine. Which showed nothing, so the medicine team was forced to admit her. Everyone grumbled, because they had no idea what to do; there was no physical source of her pain, and they figured it was just a paraneoplastic syndrome; the body just complaining about how it was eating itself. There was not much more to be done than throw narcotics at her, so John went about his business looking at charts, copying labs and writing his SOAP note, copying the assessment of "paraneoplastic syndrome" and signing and dating, making sure to label himself as "med student".<p>

Their attending was not an oncologist, and certainly not her personal doctor. She did see an oncologist at St. Barts, though, and one day the man went over to pay her a visit. Her family was there, including her 55-year-old mother. John went to observe how he spoke to the family.

"There are other options I can give you," he said, "I know that these recent developments seem like a step back, but we have other medicines we can try, if you're open."

"No," the woman wailed, "I want to stop. I want it to end. I'm tired. I want to stop."

Her mother was frantic. "Listen to me," she exclaimed, "You listen to me. You can't give up. You can't just stop fighting. We are here for you, we don't think you are a burden, we want you with us. Don't you quit now. Don't give up."

The oncologist listened calmly, but when the mother thought she was done, he added, "It's your choice. If you want us to stop all medicines, all invasive procedures, and just keep you comfortable, that's fine with me. That is completely appropriate. I am just letting you know that there are other options, we have not exhausted all of our resources yet. You can think about it for a bit. In the meantime, I'll let the primary team know to keep you as comfortable as possible."

He came out and told John, "We haven't exhausted everything…but she's Stage IV. She's never going to be 100%. You'll see a lot of this when you talk to families; family members will try to manipulate the patient and tell them, 'don't give up! You can't give up!' There's a difference between giving up, and saying 'you know what? All of this painful effort to postpone the inevitable isn't working for me. I just want to live life to the fullest for as long as I have left'. Because these treatments do decrease the quality of life, and you have to make a decision, is it worth suffering more to live just a little longer, or is it better to just be comfortable for how long you've got?"

It was interesting then, because until the oncologist pointed it out, it never occurred to John that when family members say such things, they were 'manipulating'. He always thought of them as being encouraging, giving a proper pep talk. But afterwards, as he mused on the case, he came to agree with what the oncologist said. Calling it 'giving up' is inaccurate. That was not what patients were doing when they wanted to stop treatment, and to define it that way _was _manipulative. Even if that was not the loved one's intention.

Afterwards, John would sporadically think back to this case, because it had caused such a paradigm shift.

* * *

><p>But John could also see why some patients chose to fight for those extra days. He was no longer a young medical student, independent and free and without responsibilities.<p>

"I'm sorry for this inconvenience," he said to the phone, while the surgeon reassured him, _"No, no, this is totally fine. I'll put you in for Wednesday? A patient just dropped from the schedule, so I can put you in."_

After confirming, John took a deep breath and glanced at Sherlock sitting on the sofa, feeling suddenly lost. This was it. He was going through with the procedure. The days ahead would be rough.

Sherlock stood and stepped over, placing a hand on the back of John's neck and squeezed.

"I'm here," he said.

**A/N: This is not a recommendation for anyone out there who needs surgery. Nor do I think patients are assholes. Doctors have a different expectation of themselves, though. We are use to the other side of the hospital, and a lot of us hate being patients. I can see John Watson being the same way.**


	2. Chapter One

John's oncologist was a black woman who looked uncomfortably like Sally Donovan, except with a kind of peppy attitude that Donovan would never display. She discussed John's treatment regimen once he underwent the procedure with a few warnings consisting of "you'd likely feel like shit". Sherlock's irritation seemed to amuse John for some reason, enough that the man laughed as the two left the office.

"Oncologists are eternal optimists," said John, "and you kind of want them to be. If they're not, they're apathetic, and there's nothing worse than apathy."

Sherlock disagreed; John seemed to have forgotten how Sherlock loathed sentiment, but he kept these to himself. The fact felt false, somehow.

They saw John's surgeon once before the operation after getting more up-to-date radiographs. When the surgeon asked if they were a couple, for the first time Sherlock could recall, John did not correct the assumption.

"He's my best friend," Sherlock replied when John did not. He could not say why he did, except that after John had displayed such discomfort so many times, it felt wrong to leave that impression hanging.

The surgeon gave an overview of the procedure, even though Sherlock had already looked it up. He also listed the risks and alternatives (Sherlock buried his face in his hands at that one). Alternatives were, of course, doing nothing or just chemo, which would be like doing nothing except worse. Bleeding, infection, damage to surrounding organs—and that was not even including the damage to the actual organs in question. Perioperative mortality was about 4%, which was at least better than the 15% it had been in the 1970's. Pancreatic fistula was a specific potential complication, to which Sherlock waved his hand to stop the doctor from elaborating for his sake. Malabsorption—wave. And the cancer could come back.

That one pissed Sherlock off more than anything.

"Why, because you did a lousy job?" He snapped.

The surgeon contained his annoyance well, and probably focused it on Sherlock after John immediately acted as a buffer. At length, they came to the subject of his code status.

"No," John said instantly. Sherlock looked at him.

"DNR DNI?" the surgeon confirmed. "Well you'll be intubated for the procedure, obviously, but otherwise…"

"I don't want anything done," John insisted, pointedly not looking at Sherlock. _Don't you dare, _he heard._ Don't you dare make me go through chest compressions and risk becoming a vegetable._

Sherlock said nothing.

Afterwards, they got into a black car sent by Mycroft, and John gave Sherlock a gentle scolding.

"Kindly refrain from pissing off people who are going to butcher me alive, Sherlock. I mean, we try to be professional, but taking out your anger at the doctor and making him think you're an asshole never made much sense to me, even before medical school."

"Don't worry. He thinks _you're_ an angel."

John clapped his hands over his eyes. "Doctors don't do Whipples unless they know what they're doing."

"Oh?"

"_I _didn't do Whipples after residency."

Sherlock stared at him. "You're saying that he's a good surgeon just because he knows how to do a Whipple."

"Well, he certainly can't be a bad one."

"Or he's just good at explaining that everything was the result of one of his 'risks'," Sherlock huffed. This trick was not hard to deduce. "'Bleeding, infection, and damage to surrounding organs'? How vague can you get? You might as well just say 'anything can go wrong'. You can come in drunk, treat the corpse like a drum, and all of that would be 'complications'. No one would know any better!"

"'Corpse'?"

_Damn it…_"…Patient!"

John chose not to pursue it. "It's not a security blanket for _anything,_ Sherlock. You can't accidentally slice the heart and call that 'damage to surrounding organs'."

"Oh, that's rich. You can't excuse yourself for being a _complete _idiot."

"I thought you wanted me to get this surgery," John frowned at him.

That shut Sherlock up.

* * *

><p>Sherlock told Greg Lestrade by calling him. The Detective Inspector had immediately known something was wrong; he <em>was <em>the rare competent officer in NSY, and had enough wits about him to realize that it was unusual for Sherlock to call when he could text.

"John has pancreatic cancer," Sherlock said without preamble. Really, he was not sure what the purpose of preambles even _were_, except to waste time.

Lestrade took a whole five seconds to process this. _"Shit," _he exclaimed. _"I'm coming over tonight."_

"Do," Sherlock replied, before ending the call.

True to his word, the man showed up at the flat, looking at John as if expecting him to be some kind of withered cadaver already. John, of course, was completely fine, with nothing on the outside to show that there was an illness festering inside him. The fact made it more horrifying, somehow. Sherlock depended heavily on observation; there was a reason he had been so unnerved at Baskerville. If he could not trust his senses, what could he trust? And yet other than the pulmonary embolism and John's subsequent altered behavior, there was nothing to hint that there was a cancer about to ravage his friend.

_"Pancreatic cancer is like that," _John had explained, _"You're fine for most of the stages, but then you deteriorate quickly and dramatically."_

"Whipple is Wednesday," John told Lestrade, "so I want to make the most of the days leading up to it, because after that I will spend a lot of time feeling like shit."

John was dwelling on that a lot, ever since agreeing to the Whipple. "_It's not going to be fun," _he had mused, _"fucking two-thirds of my duodenum. This is going to suck."_

His attitude was making Sherlock worry, despite himself. It was difficult to gauge how much John's quality of life would diminish with the Whipple. FAQs seemed to paint a more benign picture, but that still did not change the fact that about three-quarters of patients with Stage I die five years later, and it must happen _somehow_. Sherlock was not the type to doubt, but John had been acting like the operation, combined with the chemotherapy, was a fate worse than death.

"You'll do great," Lestrade patted John's arm, as if having surgery were something John would be active in, as opposed to knocked out with anesthesia and lying there like a corpse the whole time.

_He's not going to die. John won't die._

Even so, a well of fear sat in Sherlock's stomach, refusing to leave.

* * *

><p><strong>The Personal Blog of Dr. John H. Watson<strong>

14 October

_This is Sherlock Holmes. My friend John will probably not be posting for a while. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Fortunately, it's operable, and he is scheduled for a pancreaticoduodectomy next Wednesday. It really should be called pancreaticogastroduodectomy, since part of the stomach is sliced off. John told me that there is a variant that spares the stomach, but his surgeon told him that they would be taking the stomach anyway. Colloquially, this procedure is known as the Whipple Procedure._

_In light of this development, I will not be accepting any cases for now, as I will be supporting my friend through his operation and recovery. When he is ready, he will submit a new post on this blog. Until then, please do not contact us with any murders, thefts, missing persons, or any such problems._

_Sherlock Holmes_

_Consulting Detective_

* * *

><p>John was <em>not <em>happy when he found out Sherlock had posted the news on the blog.

"This is personal!" he yelled, looking truly angry.

Sherlock was honestly dumbfounded. "What's personal about it? It's nothing to be ashamed of. It's not like you were diagnosed with AIDS and people would talk."

"Oh my _God_," John seized his hair as he looked up at the ceiling, as if acting along with his apostrophe. "You don't get it. I don't know how you got this far when you're so incredibly _thick!_"

Sherlock started getting it when that afternoon, the reporters started hounding on their door. Mrs. Hudson sat with John while John answered phone calls from former associates, from the army and from his residency years. It figured that it took a terminal illness to get his former colleagues back in touch. _Useless garbage,_ Sherlock thought venomously, though Mike Stanford was a welcome peer. He was also the only one to whom John revealed more about how he was feeling than _'I'm alright'._

"Juliana was my co-chief," he remarked, "and her kids are almost applying to medical school. There's nothing like hearing about all the families your colleagues are building while you're still a boring bachelor. What the fuck have I been doing with my life, Mike? Ha. Sherlock certainly acts like a child. Yeah, I mean six months versus however long the Whipple buys. No, the cancer started from somewhere. I doubt any bit of my pancreas is actually _normal_."

John was already acting like he had run out of time. Curiously, when he talked to an old intern and started reminiscing about the "old days", Sherlock felt that way too.

"…No my favourite was when Wayne was chief, and Dr. White was doing a lumpectomy—I've told you this story! No? They sent the sentinel nodes down to path, and White was grumbling because there was another case afterwards and it was already six; nodes came back positive, so White was so _pissed _because now he had to do a whole mastectomy, and then Wayne said 'Ha! Looks like you're not as fast as you use to be, Dr. White!' White turned to the nurse and said, 'Can I have a towel?' Puts it over Wayne's head and _punches _him in the damn face!" A wide grin split across John's face, and his eyes glittered in a way Sherlock had only seen when in the grip of an exciting murder. "No, he just went 'Get back to work!' like nothing happened. No. He's the epitome of that joke. He knows nothing and does everything. That's true…GI is always perf-ing. Those people are fucking useless…yeah, they always do it on a Friday when there's only one attending on call and the OR schedule has like eight colectomies…For an _ appy?_" He broke into a guffaw. "Wow, that's really brave of him."

His one-sided conversation made little sense to Sherlock, but it did make him realize that there was a whole life John had lived that Sherlock had _no _understanding of. He had never bothered to investigate, because he had always assumed John was boring. John was rather dim, slow, quiet even if he was firm. It should have been obvious to Sherlock that John would be more than a long-suffering flatmate who would silently support Sherlock, obey orders and defend him from harm. John Watson was a surgeon. He had held lives in his hands, both on the fields of Afghanistan and in the operating rooms. He had been a king of his operating rooms, commanding nurses and anesthesiologists.

Sherlock always knew that John was amazing in his own way—_"That was_…_amazing. Extraordinary. Quite extraordinary." _The kind of person who would readily admit that was a person with true self-confidence, because anyone else would be defensive. John had substance, and it came from this life, a life that Sherlock had never found interesting until he realized, from his friend's ramblings, that he could not comprehend any of the references. He thought he knew everything about John, and yet this secret, this entire life that had been right in front of Sherlock's nose and could have been unveiled long before, if only he had bothered to _ask_, was incomprehensible to him.

John had lost more than the thrill of danger when he was invalided home from Afghanistan.

"That's really gross," John shook his head and seemed to refer to a third party entirely, "You're a surgeon. You have no business wearing nail polish to work. It's not like anyone's going to see it under those gloves. What's wrong with these people? Even if the regulations changed—I don't like it."

He seemed to be in a relatively good mood when he ended the calls and went to the kitchen to pour himself a glass of water.

"It's nice to hear from old friends," he said to Sherlock, "I haven't heard from them in years, but when you go through residency, a bond is forged. It's not unlike the bond between comrades-at-arms, because hospitals are run like the army sometimes. Strict hierarchy—in surgery, anyway—you follow orders from your superiors and you have a strong sense of _duty_. I remember when Harry seemed totally incapable of understanding why I couldn't just take the day off during a blizzard. You sleep at the hospital if you have to, but you better make sure you're there for signout. Not many people get that. And when you work together on services, you share night float, that sort of stuff stays. You're a family as long as you're on the same service, and when you're done, you're more than just friends."

Sherlock wondered if these colleagues could ever compete with what Sherlock and John had between them, before his logical mind dismissed the question as irrelevant. These colleagues had never bothered to contact John when he was first invalided from Afghanistan. Some friends they were.

"I miss being a surgeon, you know?" John broke into his thoughts. The man was looking into the distance without seeing, mind preoccupied with memories that can never be repeated. "It was hard, but I loved it. I loved doing things, instead of just talking. I don't even know if I can tie two-handed knots with a glove on anymore, let alone double-gloved with blood and fat all over it. I used to have those things down pat. I wouldn't have believed you if you told me I could forget it." He looked at his left hand, which had a mild tremor that only went away with adrenaline. "Though if I were a surgeon, there was no way in hell I would be able to help you on cases."

"Which life would you have preferred?" Sherlock found himself asking, even if it was not like that question had any point. John had not made the choice to be invalided and unable to do surgery.

"I honestly don't know," John admitted, still staring at his hand. "To tell you the truth, surgery got boring after a while. That's why I went into trauma, because you always see a different case. Otherwise, even though every patient is different and there are variants, after a while, all the umbilical hernias and colectomies and lobectomies started running together. Unless a person has Kartagener's or something, their liver's usually on the right side. You go through the same steps over and over again. It all loses its novelty after five years. I did go into the army to see new things, but I guess if I had stayed longer, that would have lost its appeal too." He looked at Sherlock. "If it were by choice? I think I would have preferred this. The hardest part was having that choice made for me. That part's always hard. But the results?" He shrugged. "I don't have a lot of accomplishments. I doubt, even if I weren't invalided, that I would come to fame and fortune as an army surgeon. The last few years with you justify my life, I think. I would have died happily yesterday, if it came to that."

"You still have time," Sherlock said, and wondered if he was convincing John or himself.

* * *

><p>Some of John's co-residents visited him two days before his surgery. Sherlock put up with them since it was so important to John. He found himself barely able to keep from kicking everyone out. He was not even sure why they were so annoying, even if they were.<p>

"John was my chief," said Dr. Smith, a tall, gangly fellow with long brown hair and brown eyes. "I always cheered whenever I find out that I'm on his service. He's one of the nicest blokes in the program."

"His sutures were always so neat," Dr. Faria, a Portuguese man with a narrow face and large nose, told Sherlock, "I had him pinned down for plastics, but he went to trauma."

"Nosejobs aren't really my interest," John said wryly.

"You could have done reconstructive surgery. For trauma."

"Too many drunk drivers. I got real sick of those idiots after a while. I don't know how ENT puts up with them."

"ENT?" Sherlock raised his eyebrows.

"Ear-Nose-Throat doctors," John clarified, a little surprised.

"Oh, of course." Sherlock mentally hit himself for being so stupid. _What else could it be?_

"You mean you weren't surrounded by idiots in Afghanistan?"

"Hey," John snapped, tone light but serious, "lay off my boys."

"Yes sir!" No salute, but the words came easily.

"Such a shame you're a GP now," said Dr. Green, much to Sherlock's intense displeasure. "What a downgrade. How is it, having to talk to so many people all day?"

"It's not that bad actually," John confessed, taking Dr. Green's insult in a stride. "GP's more interesting than surgery, in a lot of ways. Gatekeeper, so all the weird stuff has to pass through you first. Plus, it's a lot of preventive medicine, and I actually feel like I'm doing something when it works, rather than just cutting something out and then leaving the patient to deal with the aftermath. I didn't go into surgery because I didn't like talking to conscious people. I went in there for the cutting."

"For the bowels," Dr. Smith laughed. "I had you nailed down for colorectal."

"I should have gone into colorectal!" John slapped his chair. "I love bowels! They're so pretty, unless the patient's obese and they're all covered in fat. Even then though…"

"Bowels _are _pretty," Dr. Faria agreed.

Sherlock blinked. That was strange, even for him.

"Unless they forgot the bowel regimen the day before," said Dr. Green, with a shudder.

For Sherlock's benefit, the group recounted mischief they were up to during their residency.

"We should tell him about the chocolate disaster," Smith said to John, who grinned.

"We should. Dan and I were on night float, and it was some month of the summer, I can't remember when anymore. Basically, for night float, you're in charge of several different services. I was in charge of Blue, Transplant, and White, and Dan was in charge of Red, Yellow, and Trauma teams. You don't know the patient because you didn't take their history and you don't actually see the patient yourselves, unless there's something wrong and the nurses page you up. But the point of night float is to make sure the patients are alive and as stable as possible for the day-team to take over in the morning, because you _don't know the patient_, beyond the signout that the day team gives you. It's not supposed to be about making complicated decisions for the patient's care; if the patient is not dying, the nurse shouldn't page you."

"I swear, I still have nightmares where I think my pager went off and I wake up—"

"Me too!"

"Even when my real pager goes off, my heart still stops."

"That particular month, somehow the nurses didn't get the memo. They decided to page us with the stupidest things, without any sort of text to help us gauge whether this was an emergency or not. You know, 'Can Mr. Parry have water?' has a different urgency scale than 'Mrs. Dunham has SOB'." He paused. "SOB means Shortness of Breath."

"And it's doubly annoying, too, because every time you get paged, you're obligated to stop what you're doing to answer it, unless what you're doing is also urgent, then first-come-first-serve—but I'd be talking to a patient and my pager would go off five times within ten minutes, and the patient's like 'what the hell is going on?'"

"They double-page you too, which is usually a no-no," John shook his head, "I would hear the pager, reach for the phone, and _as I was dialing_ the pager would go off again, _from the same nurse, _and then again as I was talking to the nurse, some other nurse would page me, all within half a minute. I mean, night float isn't supposed to be like this. You're supposed to make sure that the patient survives through the night so that the day-team can make the proper decisions in the morning."

"My pager ran out of the cap," Smith looked at John, "I got like 400 pages in two nights once. For night float. That's _insane_. This doesn't even happen during the _day._"

"And we couldn't complain to anyone because by the time we come in, the day shift's over and people with office hours had gone home," John said to Sherlock. "So we figured, if we couldn't go whinging about it, we might as well go laughing about it, so we made a game. Kind of like those games where you drink every time someone uses the word that ends with '-itis'."

"But we couldn't take actual shots," said Dr. Smith, "because obviously, you can't work while inebriated. So Sarah and Joanne from the day teams made four gallons of chocolate—I don't want to call it _milk_. It was _way _more potent than milk."

"There was cocoa, coffee, syrup, mixed with half-and-half. It wasn't milk."

"There's gotta be some secret ingredient. That thing woke me up far more effectively than any Red Bull."

"The game goes, every time we get paged," John told Sherlock, "we drink a 'shot' of chocolate milk as a sort of consolation prize. We figured, four gallons would be enough, but that particular night float the two of us went through all of it four hours before our shift ended."

"And I couldn't even _look _at chocolate after that," Smith exclaimed.

"I actually _got _sick," said John, "I think my pancreas had a stroke, because that was some stomach pain I had when I tried to go to bed that morning, and I had such weird bowel movements that I thought I had C diff."

"Stupid theobromine poisoning!" Smith laughed, "They don't teach us anything useful during medical school! Theobromine poisoning? Did you know you can get that through chocolate overdose?"

"Needless to say, we totally played that game again," John grinned, "because you have no business being a surgeon if you can't handle a little pain. And diarrhea." He paused. "We should play that game right now."

"You sure?" Smith asked.

"Why not?" John shrugged, "My pancreas is fucked either way."

Green and Faria immediately volunteered to purchase the necessary ingredients.

* * *

><p>"God help us," Sherlock told John after his colleagues left, "you surgeons are some of the dumbest idiots I have ever come across."<p>

"Hey," John exclaimed defensively, "I thought Anderson was the dumbest idiot. Besides, if you thought we were bad, you haven't seen urology. Anyway, I need to talk to you."

It was a serious 'I need to talk to you', so Sherlock was instantly at attention.

"I have you as my power of attorney," John slid a pile of papers over, "and I modified my will—"

Sherlock bowed his head in frustration. "Do we _really _need to talk about this now?"

"Look, there is no _too soon _for this kind of talk, unless you're a kid in which case that _might _be a little too soon, but just because I drafted up my will doesn't mean I intend on dying from Wednesday. It's just a precaution. Now, you were there when I said I didn't want resuscitation or intubation, but I want you to know what I _do _want, in case something happens and I'm not around to speak for myself."

It was all very logical, and Sherlock _should _pay attention to this, but he could not stay still. Lurching to his feet, he stomped away from John, angry for no reason he could explain.

"_Sit down,_" John suddenly commanded. It was a tone of voice Sherlock had never heard from him before.

The detective sat on the sofa, far away from where John was. He could not bring himself to match the other's gaze.

John looked like he wanted to sigh and just barely refrained. "If we talk about this, it doesn't mean I'll die," he pointed out, "Just as avoiding the topic doesn't spare me from death, if that is my destiny."

Sherlock scowled, still not looking at him.

"No," the doctor pointed, "In this matter, I know more than you. You deal with people after they die. I dealt with people while they were dying. If you can't do this, I will have to switch power of attorney to someone else. No clue whom," his lip twisted in distaste, "not Harry, anyway."

_Harry._ The name fueled his temper like a match to a dynamite. John's useless excuse of a sister hung up on him after he had told her about his condition, and had ceased to answer his calls or texts.

"I'm trusting you with my life, Sherlock," John said quietly.

Sherlock could not bring himself to respond. John took this as his cue.

"Transfusions are fine," he told Sherlock. "Wound debridements are fine. Medications are fine. Arterial lines are fine. Central lines are fine."

"What are central lines."

"Central lines are like IV's, but instead of in the arm, they go through one of three places." John gestured on himself. "Jugular, subclavian, and," he gestured at his thigh, "femoral."

He relaxed his arms. "Beyond those, I don't want very invasive procedures, though I will trust your judgment on what is minor enough that I would allow it."

_I don't know if that's wise, _Sherlock thought miserably, but he knew better than to voice this out loud.

"If I become irreversibly comatose, I want hospice care. No outrageous measures. If I am not able to eat; no PEG tube."

"Stop." Sherlock raised his hands to his ears and squeezed his eyes shut. "Stop. Stop talking. I don't want to hear this."

After a moment, John leaned back. "That's fine," Sherlock heard him through his hands. "I'm pretty much done anyway. That's the gist of it."

Sherlock lowered his hands and glared at the fireplace. He felt cold from within, even though the temperature of their flat was as warm as always.

"Hey," John called to him, "I'm not dead yet."

"No you're not," Sherlock snapped.

"But I will die one day," the doctor pointed out. "You've always known that."

Logically, of course Sherlock did. He just never had to acknowledge it until now.

John made a sound like a suppressed laugh. "You deal with a lot of death," he observed, "but you don't really understand it, do you?"

"What's there to understand?" Sherlock turned to meet John's amused eyes. "Death is death. The end."

"No, but you've never lost someone close to you. For you, the deaths you've seen are no more remarkable than seeing a dead cockroach or a fly. Fascinating, in some ways, but it's not impressive to you. They're not so much _deaths_, as just a change in state. You've never watched the fight, experienced the fight for survival along that person. You only see the aftermath. And that's fine." John's eyes were compassionate. It hurt. "I never thought that in this subject, I would know more than you, but I guess that's not surprising. It's hard for other people to understand, I think. They don't see how all of these battles unfold. And it _is _a battle, kind of like football. How the game's won or lost is as important as what the scores were. It's something…I don't know. Other people might see a lot of death too, but it's different for doctors, because we fight for your survival along with you, even if we don't fight _for _you.

"But more than just seeing the patients, you also see the family. You see parents grieve for their child, husbands for their wives. You see all the different ways. Some are completely, utterly devastated. Others grieve no less, but they aren't rendered incapacitated. They still function, and they carry the memory of their loved one with them. Grief can be a bearable emotion. And you can think back fondly, later on."

"You're not going to die," Sherlock said angrily. Why was John talking like he was going to die?

John did not say more, which was just to Sherlock's preference.

* * *

><p>The day of the surgery, Sherlock waited in the Holding Area to support John.<p>

Mycroft waited in the Holding Area to support Sherlock.

"God," John groaned, "I think the bowel regimen itself is enough to turn me off from this side of surgery."

"Whinging is unbecoming of you," Mycroft stated disapprovingly. "Please, you've endured much worse."

"…I don't know about that. Now I _really _understand why we frequently find gold nuggets when we weren't counting on any."

John was scheduled for 7:00. He was brought here at 6:30. There was one other patient, an old woman in her late eighties for an orthopedic procedure. An old drunk who broke her ankle, likely because she stumbled around inebriated and could not gauge a fall. Sherlock snarled. He felt like he was a wire that was coiled too tightly.

"Hey," John rested a hand on his arm, "it's going to be fine."

Hypocrite, but Sherlock could not bring it in himself to shrug it off.

"The thing lasts six hours, and then there's post-anesthesia and other logistics. Go home, eat something, solve a case, and come back."

As if Sherlock would dare to do anything that would distract him from his friend.

John's hand left him, and Mycroft stepped closer, a dark pillar for Sherlock to lean on even though he was speaking to John.

"I'll figure something out," he said, "you'll be fine."

John just smiled.

People kept coming up to the bed to sign the chart. Some nurse, the anesthesia attending, the surgical attending himself, and then the anesthesia attending sat and poked needles into John. Mycroft stayed close, and Sherlock found himself feeling reluctantly grateful. With Mycroft's presence, at least they could ensure that all the logistics were taken care of.

And then it was time.

Once the preparations were done, everything happened quickly. The anesthesiologists pushed a sedative into John immediately, to help relax him. They switched off the breaks with a loud _thunk_ and started wheeling the bed out. Sherlock was already seeing the start of the effects when he reached down and grabbed John's hand.

"We'll be here when you come out," he promised.

John squeezed back with a smile. "Go do something. You'll get bored."

And then he was past Sherlock and out the doors.

Sherlock and Mycroft stared after it for a few seconds, before they both turned and made their way to the waiting room.

It will be a long six hours.


	3. Chapter Two

One day, at the end of a case, John and Sherlock had walked back to their flat on Baker Street. Sherlock was fuming at himself—_it's always that **one **th__ing—_and John, normally reserved in giving his opinions, had stated, _"Well, of course. You can't see—" _and then cut himself off.

Sherlock, who was expecting something annoyingly patronizing like "you can't be perfect, Sherlock, even if you think you can" or "everyone misses something, you're already amazing as it is", did not miss how oddly he had phrased it, and had latched on immediately: _"What do you mean?"_

Like a turtle, John had withdrawn, attempting to wave it off as some slip of the tongue or simply lousy word choices, but Sherlock did not let him get away. Finally, John had reluctantly hinted, _"There's a reason anything that can see has more than one eye. Brain can compensate for depth perception, you know. But there's a scotoma in every visual field, which is why you need two fields with different scotomas so that the rest of the fields make up for each other."_

A scotoma was essentially a blind spot. That, Sherlock knew. What he didn't know was why John had answered this way. He knew that there was a very good reason. John was not as sharp as Sherlock, but there was always a depth to him. From the moment they met, Sherlock knew John was different, because John did not balk at Sherlock's idiosyncrasies. He took almost all of them in a stride, as if everything Sherlock did were normal and nothing to gawk at. It was as if John had _known_ him, the moment he laid eyes on him, and saw behind what others would perceive as bizarre tendencies.

For a doctor, especially a former surgeon, John had always been unassuming. There were times when Sherlock would forget that John was even a physician. John was just John, a man Sherlock had liked from the start, quietly present and non-judgmental. It was what tied the two together so closely. Sherlock had always been judged, by his parents for his bizarre taste for the macabre, by his brother for being stupid, by his peers for being strange. Though John would remark and complain about something he would never have to put up with from anyone else, he was never demeaning, and Sherlock never felt belittled or forsaken for it. In this instance, the fact that John _was _a doctor would be very apparent. Not all doctors shared the same level of equanimity, but there was a profundity to him that came only from being in contact with many different personalities, and being acquainted with their life arcs. While Sherlock was gifted in predicting the immediate futures, the tiny details that could lead to one conclusion, John had a knack for telling long-term outcomes, the way personalities might click or drift apart, how neglect or attention would yield neglect or attention in return. Sherlock knew the surface aspects: John was an army doctor, was shot, craved danger—John knew the core: Sherlock was flighty, craved his own personality, and would fly, far far away, denouncing any ties that would hold him back and threaten his individuality. He had once stated, with great gravity, that if Sherlock's parents were ever ill, Sherlock would only visit them if he had nothing better to do, and the burden of caring for their parents would fall on Mycroft, both because he had the resources and because he would accept the duty. It was something that Sherlock knew to be quite true, of course. However, he had never specifically thought about it until John pointed it out.

So it was important to Sherlock when John said such things, such as equating his inability to perform 100% with something to do with blind spots and two eyes. He felt like it should be extremely simple—John was not a complex man, even if he was profound—but in his frustration and subsequent distraction, he never got around to answering it.

Now, left alone with Mycroft, Sherlock loaded John's blog on his phone. When he got to the section where John talked about his ignorance of the solar system, he paused. There was something about that part that nagged at him, though he could not say why. John was not the sort of man to be inconsiderate of other people's feelings. Quite the opposite. He had left out, for example, how Sherlock tested his hypothesis on John by attempting to drug John's tea, perhaps on the basis that Sherlock was wrong. Yet he had typed in this section, an obvious dig at Sherlock's intelligence, and then reacted as if Sherlock's anger had been unreasonable.

Sherlock could not fathom why.

John's voice spoke to him from the words, wry and full of humor, as if he were smiling. There was very little in the blog about John himself, though. It was mainly about Sherlock, his admiration for the detective, his amusement, occasional frustration, and a deep-seated gratitude. Short and to the point—_"We don't waste words, not like GPs," _John had said, _"Just palpate your abdomen and go—" _John was in his blog as he was in real life: unassuming, unobtrusive, inconspicuous.

"He seems so dull in the blog," Mycroft said thoughtfully. He had been reading Sherlock's phone from the side. "Why _did _you bring him on the first case?"

"A whim," said Sherlock. "I didn't know he would accept until he did."

"He should be paid for putting up with the sort of stunts you pull," Mycroft snorted. "Never thought I would meet a man who is remarkable for something as boring as _patience_."

"He's a wise man," Sherlock defended. "He is the one person I can learn from in this world."

"True enough," Mycroft agreed, to Sherlock's mild surprise. "He is a great man in his own right. Shame this world does not highlight qualities like his."

Sherlock did not speak. He stared at the blog, wishing it could reveal more about the man who was his colleague and friend and even brother. He wished John had kept journals from when he was a student, or a resident. Just…something that was more about himself.

_Five years_, he thought, looking at the clock. Tick tock.

* * *

><p><em>13-1-1998, 21:14<em>

_On 24 hr call, damn it, and the cases finished by 1500. Why can't I be on call during a colectomy? At least I wouldn't feel all the hours like I could have gone home. But we debrided Thompson's hidradenitis, finally. It smelled like arse. My medical student nearly passed out. I sent her to get lunch. I wish someone could send me to get lunch. Being a resident is awful.  
><em>

_I'm starting in the wrong order. Today I woke up at 2:40 in the morning because we have 65 people on our list. I want to kill myself; they should have more than three general services when each of us is always at least 50. Thank god for the med students, because otherwise there was no way we could have seen everyone for rounds. And even then, rounds went over, and Dr. Speller was pissed, because he had to delay his first OR case. Of note, Mary White got a nice bout of atelectasis because she didn't know how to use her spirometer. It figures. She's probably not going home anytime soon. Wayne Bishop's bowels refuse to wake up, so he's still dependent on TPN. He's the most annoying bloke in the world; every time we go into his room he has a million questions and he's so emotional too, so a 2-minute visit takes 30. Does this guy have a brain? Because if he's just going to forget everything we've said to him anyway, then I want to just cut him off so we can see the 64 other patients. That guy can't leave soon enough._

_Joan Watson was a sad case though. 32 yo F with colon cancer. Non-smoker, non-drinker, she's the cleanest whistle that ever whistled. Why does a nice girl like that get something like this? And she's handling post-op really poorly. 39.4 fever POD 4, and she's in so much pain that of course she gets a DVT. There's nothing much we can do for her except pump her full of heparin, at least until the pain's controlled enough for her to ambulate. And she gets to have a fucking ostomy when she gets out. Poor girl._

_So after those cheerful roundings, with the ever pleasant Dr. Speller, I got to hang out with him in the cases today, because God loves tormenting his little mortals. Case-in-point: that stinking hidradenitis, and then the umbilical hernia, and my sweat dropped into the mesh while we were suturing it in. It's not my fault the room was so hot, but Speller shouted at me like I deliberately squirted it in. We had to take the mesh out and do it all over again with a different mesh and I had to stay far away from the op table because apparently, I'm a lousy surgeon. For sweating. I hate my life. Stupid hernias—I miss trauma, because at least those were interesting! Next case was hemorrhoid banding, at least, so we didn't have to be as sterile. Weird though, she was a skinny little Asian woman. Never figured that those folks would have a problem with fiber._

_Fuck, my pager's off. I'm writing this down for the record: I'm betting that it's some seventy-year-old drunk who fell in the bathroom and gave himself a subdural hematoma. Likely? Likely. We shall see later. —John Watson_

_22:04_

_It totally was an SDH! But the lady had Parkinson's, so not so bad. Neurosurg gave me a lot of shit though. It's a SDH, there's no argument here! You have to admit her to your service! It's not like we idiot gen-surgs can do a craniotomy. Seriously, what is up with these residents? Even I don't go so far as to fight patients who actually need to be on my service._

_Ugh, my pager's off again. It better not be another SDH. —John Watson_

_22:24_

_How the hell did I get a consult for "asymptomatic appendicitis"? I swear these ER docs get worse every year. This is a winner: 54 yo M who came in for abdominal pain—that resolved. The ER resident ordered an abdominal CT for some reason and the radiologist read that there "might be some inflammation of the appendix". The chap had no pain. Zero. Nothing. I was mashing on his belly and he didn't even flinch. I swear, they should fire everyone in the ER. "Asymptomatic appendicitis". What are they teaching in med schools these days?_

_Damn it, my pager is off again. Seriously? I'm not getting any sleep tonight, am I? —John Watson_

_03:47_

_Ex-lap. 23 yo bastard got fucking stabbed. The kicker was that he's been operated on before…for getting stabbed. There were adhesions everywhere, so of__ course __this thing turns into a how many hours has it been? Holy shit we were in there for 5 hours? Oh my God. Well, I was planning on writing more of the actual day, but I have to pre-round. Maybe tomorrow. Or, uh, yeah. This is tomorrow. Already. So I guess the evening after, because I'm going straight to bed after rounds today. —John Watson._

* * *

><p>Six hours later, almost on the dot, John's surgeon waltzed into the waiting room with a cap over his head and his mask still on his face.<p>

"He did very well," he shook Sherlock's hand, as if this were something Sherlock ought to be personally proud of. "He's in PACU, and the nurses will let you know when he's headed up to the floors. Great job. Couldn't have gone better."

It was one obstacle over, and Sherlock found he could breathe. Though he knew the chances were smaller than his fears made them seem, surviving surgery was not an insubstantial victory. "Can I see him now?" he asked.

"Well, the anesthesiologists need to look over him first," said the surgeon, "so it'll be a while. We don't let people back there because when it gets cluttered, things get lost, things are confusing, and we _really _don't want that around our patients."

Sherlock turned to Mycroft, but it was clear his brother was not going to step in to bend the rules.

"It might take a while," said the surgeon, lifting a phone to his ear, "I gotta get started on the next case, but I'll be rounding on him later. Alright?"

Nearly three hours passed before John was wheeled up to the floors. He was covered with layers of warm blankets, which radiated heat in a way that made Sherlock suspect they had come out of some kind of oven or incubator. Mycroft secured a private room, so when the staff finished establishing everything, the three of them were left alone.

John was groggy from all the painkillers, but he lifted his gown to look at the drain coming out of his abdomen. Some blood collected along the tube poking from _inside _the man's belly, fixed in place by thick stitches that looked sharp and uncomfortable. The sight filled Sherlock with unease. Things were not supposed to come out of a living person.

"Huh," John looked at the bulb and the small collection of blood in it. "Not bad."

The wound itself was covered with white dressings. John did not allow Sherlock to take a look.

"They will stay on for 24 hours," he told Sherlock. "You can look at the staples later."

"Any pain?" he asked anxiously.

John shook his head. "Not really. Feel fuzzy, though." He looked up. "Did you get some sleep?"

Sherlock stared at him, speechless.

John glared at Mycroft. "You were supposed to think of something."

"He wouldn't have slept even if he went home," Mycroft pointed out, "and it's not like he had anything better to do at home."

John shook his head, but seemed to accept this.

"My throat feels awful," he exclaimed, "I wish I could drink. NPO really sucks."

John did not use so many medical abbreviations before. Sherlock was not sure whether he liked this new development. On the one hand, he thought it was annoying and unnecessary, but John did it so easily and naturally, and it was like watching his old self, which he had kept hidden all this time, unfold before Sherlock at last.

"How long before they let you eat?" Mycroft asked.

"Probably at least five to six days before they let me have clear liquids. Bowels need to wake up. They took quite a bashing." He turned his head to the side and closed his eyes.

Sherlock and Mycroft sat down in silence.

* * *

><p>The nausea started late that night.<p>

Perhaps it was more of a build. John did not elaborate. All Sherlock knew was that when the nurse came to take John's vitals, the man whimpered, and kept whimpering.

"What's wrong?" the nurse asked. Sherlock twitched his head to listen. Mycroft had left as the evening drew to a close, offering his car for Sherlock to return to 221B. Sherlock only had to think of the flat, empty with lifeless clutter, to rudely turn down Mycroft's offer.

"…sick."

"You feel nauseous?"

_It's **nauseated**. Ugh. Learn English, for crying out loud._ She was a healthcare provider, how could she not know? But Sherlock chose not to correct her in favor of looking at John, who nodded weakly.

"Okay, I'll page the surgeon on call to ask if we can increase your Zofran, okay?"

Sherlock suddenly had an image of John, starting at his pager, and then reluctantly drinking a shot of chocolate before reaching for the phone.

Sherlock did not often feel nauseated; in fact, it had been years since he had been sick. He did remember how potent it was, and got up from his next of blankets on the couch to check on John. Skin warm, though not too warm. Sherlock reached for his hand.

"Bad?" he asked.

John inhaled but did not reply.

Sherlock expected a doctor to come by, but the nurse entered moments later to start John's Zofran.

"It's just Zofran," John whispered, "they won't come."

He did not vomit. He just lied there, silently suffering, while Sherlock waited with bated breath for the antiemetic to do its work. When John finally fell asleep, there was a stillness to him that Sherlock did not like. He had never seen John like this before.

No puzzle. No creativity. Just a disease, cut out, along with parts that were not diseased. How dull. _Boring_.

Helpless.

How John could just _accept _all of this, with the kind of calm and serenity he had accepted everything else, was beyond Sherlock's comprehension. Sherlock's world was one where people came to misfortune only because they were too stupid to avoid it. Getting shot, stabbed, kidnapped, all of these things could be dodged, if one was sharp enough. He had even drugged himself up with no long-term consequence. Not this senseless, random blow from inside, despite doing everything right and being a good man. If Sherlock were in John's place, he wold have gone mad; to be confined to bed, waiting around for other people to do things and for things to happen, nauseated, unable to move, unable to _think_—he would probably kill someone.

_"I've done amputations," _John had told him once, _"in the army, sometimes a limb has to go. Arm, leg, both. Doesn't matter. I never really felt all that much about it; it had to be done, no use thinking about it. And I didn't want to. Didn't want to think about how much harder it will be for these people. They're going to go everywhere and draw stares. They're going to have to crane their necks from their wheelchairs, go around the long way, or perhaps be trapped because there's no ramp at all. They can't put all of their groceries in one arm to open the door for themselves. You see people get by. They usually do. You adapt or you die, and once you come to terms with what has happened to your body, life is still worth living. But it is hard to watch, all the same. These…able-bodied, healthy men. All soldiers are healthy and fit, of course. They train, they exercise, they learn to do two hundred crutches, and all that power, packed in those muscles. You listen to their hearts and it's strong, it pounds at your stethoscope and through the earpieces, as if saying 'Mmph! Oh yes! I am here and I am working, ah-hah, I am working!' There is something about palpating abdomens too—it's different to palpate a young abdomen, whether it is male or female. You can feel it, and it's not just because of the skin texture—I could feel with gloves on. Young versus old, no matter the habitus. So you see such fine specimens of nature—nature had shaped these beautiful, healthy, strong bodies, with so much potential…and then this world ruins it. It hurts, to see that loss, because it's the death of a dream, and no matter which way you rationalize, you feel like you swung the axe."_

Sherlock had taken it as inevitable that John would be with him till the end. The man craved danger, and would clearly make room in his life for Sherlock's cases—for _Sherlock_, no matter what happened in his life. He saw himself and John growing old, sitting on the park benches watching people, John listening to his deductions as always, though they were both old and grey. They fit, like two halves of a puzzle, two magnets opposite each other. Why would they ever separate, once they have found each other?

But John's still form seemed like a shadow before the real image. Seeing him actually sick made all of this more real, somehow. Before, John had been almost normal—not quite up to his usual stamina, perhaps, but that was hardly worth noticing. Vibrant and full of vitality, like a proper soldier.

He fell asleep at some point. He dreamed that he and John were walking home from a case, but then they were walking to someplace else, or at least John was. Sherlock tried to follow, but despite his best efforts, John was going further and further ahead of him. He cried out, calling for John to stop, but John kept going. Then Sherlock was alone, and he began searching, looking for John, examining every detail and looking for any sign of where the blonde man might have gone, but there were no signs, and he never found him.

* * *

><p><em>15-1-1998, 19:00<br>_

_Hemicolectomy procedure today. Dr. Mackey's patient, 43 yo M with no significant medical history. What's with all these young people getting colon cancers? Anyway, the lump was actually quite big. I'm surprised this guy didn't get a bowel obstruction. Nature of the human body never ceases to amaze me._

_We were able to watch a little bit of the Winter Olympics today in the library, though I didn't see who won because I got paged. Bishop finally farted at around 13:00. Of course, because he's been on TPN all this time, we have to watch his phosphate when we transition him to oral. At least I see a light at the end of this tunnel. Shouldn't be long before that guy's out of here. At least we only spent 20 minutes in his room this am. Where does he get all the questions anyway?  
><em>

_Dan broke up with his girlfriend. I feel kind of glad that I'm single at the moment, because I'm not sure I can handle that kind of provocation. He's been fucking up his pre-rounds, so of course Speller yelled at him. Still, it's rough. He was really fond of her, and I can't imagine the breakup to have started from his end. Although he seems like such a nice fellow. Maybe he is more demanding at home, but he's a good resident, and I feel really sorry for him._

_It's times like these when I kind of wish I had been interested in anything other than surgery. What would it have been like if I were in psych? I bet I'd have a life. Easy clinic hours in outpatient, and relatively sane inpatient hours. They're all about keeping everyone happy. I can use some of that. Here's some lithium. Want some Prozac? Having no procedures would drive me insane though. They don't even know how to put an IV in. Plus, if I have to talk to that many people and learn about their pet pooches, I might have a psychotic break. I don't care why you're an arse! I just care that you are, and I want you away from me or unconscious. Although I would also have time get laid…. This is so depressing. I don't know how our attendings have kids. They're also up at 3 in the morning, even if they don't come in. Though Mackey divorced at least once, and Adams is in the middle of a divorce. Which really bodes well for my marital future._

_Still, if those OB/Gyn people can get married, shouldn't I be able to get a wife? I mean those guys are like Temper on steroids. You'd think those people would be happier, considering all their patients actually want to be here. Especially that third-year resident, Nancy. Oh my God, she's a terror. The little ones always are. I'm not an obstetrician, and yet she expects me to know all these esoteric facts when I'm just the dumb surgeon. The uterus and the baby in it belong to her. I just fiddle around with the bowels. Murph is nice though. I like him. It's too bad he's graduating this year, because that program sure could use someone like him as a nice buffer. It's actually not that hard to imagine that he has a wife and a one-year-old son. When I grow up, I want to be like him: sane._

_I'll stop here. I really haven't been good about really updating on cases this week, but this week's call was brutal. I hate this service, there are way too many patients and too few residents to disperse. Have to wake up at 2 in the morning again, so calling it a night. —John Watson_

* * *

><p>They drew John's blood at 3. The surgeon came at 4. He did not take the dressing off, but he mashed around John's belly with his hand, checked the drains, and then waltzed off with instructions for John to "open up the lungs". Sherlock looked at the clock and wondered if these hospitals understood the concept of "healing sleep". There was certainly none of that here.<p>

Mrs. Hudson came to visit the next morning, but John was still too queasy to take much advantage of her company. Instead, he spent most of the time lying there, listening to her talk, and occasionally exercising with his incentive spirometry. It looked difficult—he was supposed to inhale as forcefully as he could, and the suction should raise the block to a certain height, but every time it would just twitch a little bit, leaving John exhausted.

"Hate this," John whispered, looking a little green, but he never retched. Small mercies.

Mrs. Hudson took Sherlock down to the cafeteria to get breakfast. It was not the worst cafeteria Sherlock had seen, though he thought it was ironic that a hospital should serve such unhealthy menus to its visitors and staff. They ate in the cafeteria because they did not want the smell to provoke John's nausea.

"How are you doing, dear?" she asked, while Sherlock tried not to rush her—he had no appetite, and was pushing his food around restlessly.

"I'm fine."

"Oh Sherlock," she looked sympathetic and disappointed. "You don't look as happy as I thought you would about this. John looks a bit ill, but at least he's free of the cancer."

His elbow banged the table as he lifted it to cover his forehead. "We're fighting for years, not decades," he said.

"Well he certainly wouldn't live long with _that _kind of attitude," Mrs. Hudson reproached. "With the way you boys have been running around in London, how did you know that a bullet wouldn't take him out sooner? Besides, he initially had six _months_, Sherlock. Perhaps not even that long. Years is _many times _longer, and think of all the mischief you two could manage," she reached out and squeezed his hand with her wrinkled, dry ones. "I know this is overwhelming, Sherlock. I don't like to see him that ill either, but you mustn't lose heart, now. He's fighting, and he's not doing too badly."

John's nausea did ease later that day, and with it, Sherlock's own anxiety. John's spirometry began improving too, and he raised a thumb at Sherlock. "Wind averted," he told him.

Mike Stamford visited in the afternoon, when Mrs. Hudson had gone home.

"You're looking good," said Stamford.

"Better than I felt this morning," John agreed.

Sherlock kept himself out of their conversation, choosing instead to observe Stamford. Stamford was the reason Sherlock even met John, and had in fact deliberately brought the two together. Why the man decided to do this, Sherlock had neer examined before. He figured it was just a whim, but now he wondered if Stamford had been smarter than he let on. That he shared a little bit of John's wisdom, and had recognized how well the two would fit.

Either way, Sherlock would forever be in Stamford's debt.

"What do you think of talking to medical students once you're out?" Stamford asked.

John raised his eyebrows. "I don't know. I'll have to think about it."

"What do you mean?" Sherlock asked, for once not following.

"For lectures," said John, "Mike's asking me to go as a guest speaker. Talk about what it's like to be a patient. Not a bad idea, but I don't know. Teaching kids was never my thing."

"They're good kids, little horrors though they might be," Stamford insisted. "It's early, but I thought I'd ask you now and give you time to ponder. It's in a few months."

The IV machine started beeping obnoxiously. Sherlock caught sight of the words "Occlusion Downstream" before John straightened his elbow with a scowl and the beeping stopped.

John seemed to take that as a cue to start whinging.

"I hate this."

"I know." Mike seemed completely sympathetic.

"I forgot how badly hospitals _smell_. It smells like sweat and vomit and piss. That's one thing I don't miss. I hate this stupid gown—why not just give us a blanket, it functions about as much as a blanket would anyway!"

The two men started laughing. John cut himself off as he winced. "Not good."

Sherlock went to him quickly. "Are you alright?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. Just not a good idea to have any pressure on the abdomen right now."

Stamford started laughing again once he was certain John was alright. "Man, of all people to be here, I didn't expect it to be you, John."

"Me neither."

"Figures that being a patient would be the one thing you would complain about," Stamford chuckled.

"I hate hospitals."

"Everyone does."

They laughed again, John more carefully, sharing something Sherlock could not deduce, because it was obvious and yet completely unknown to him. They were both doctors, had lived a certain life, and while Sherlock could know _of _it, he could never understand it, because he had never lived that life. He wondered if this was how John felt whenever he and Mycroft were together, communicating at that higher level of awareness, knowing _of _it but not sharing the insights.

After a few more words, Stamford left. John inhaled through his spirometer. This time, it went up quite high.

"Amazing stuff, Zofran," John smiled.

It was probably not wise, but Sherlock tried the spirometer as well, doing unsurprisingly better than John. John allowed him without comment, the way an older sibling might allow a child to take a toy away.


	4. Chapter Three

The post-op days dragged. They had absolutely nothing to do except wait for John's bowels to wake up. John made an effort to ambulate, but it was slow going because while he denied nausea, he still felt unwell, so he shuffled like an elderly man, Sherlock close by to support him, round and round the hall ways past the nursing stations and the various hospital staff with their pagers and telephones and cells.

He spent most of his time sleeping, too tired to even stare at the television. Sherlock tried to work on his own blog, but he had difficulty concentrating. It was like John's fatigue was infecting his mind. He watched John use the spirometer and sleep and stare at the ceiling and look out in the hall. Sometimes he looked under John's dressings, just for lack of things to do, but the wound looked the same every time; some bits of dried blood near the staples, pale, dry, and intact. The drain kept draining blood, but slowly, and poking around it could be interesting for only so long.

"You're bored out of your mind," John remarked on the fourth day. "You should ask Greg if there's a case."

"I'm not taking any cases."

"You should. There's no reason for you to be cooped up here with me. At least I can focus on being sick. The only interesting thing about this place is the demented old people occasionally screaming out their hallucinations." As if on cue, a female patient down the hall started singing a steady note, vibrato and all, as if she were a prima donna.

_"Ohhhhhhh! Ohhhhhhhhhhhh!"_

_"You're doing great, ma'am. Almost done."_

_"Ohhhhhhhhh!"_

It took a full second for Sherlock to realize that this was her version of screaming in pain. Not demented, but the point was made.

"Oh wow," John blinked. "I forgot some women do that. Why do they do that? Why can't they just scream like normal people? And their voices are always better than mine. Always. Which is what _really _pisses me off. I'm relaxed and happy in the shower, and I can't get my notes half as good as when these people are getting burned by lidocaine."

"It's because she's not actually in pain, obviously," Sherlock scoffed, "she's just _frightened_." _When did John ever sing in the shower? _His logic supplied the answer immediately: _when John lived alone. Perhaps as a resident, or later in the army. Before he was shot._

John shrugged, which indicated that he knew as much, despite his questions. "Do you sing when _you're _frightened, Sherlock?" he teased.

Sherlock threw his flattest stare at John. _Why would you even ask?_

"I can just imagine this," John's face split into a wide, impish grin. "You, getting your tetanus shot, and then Sarah shows up with this giant needle and presses it into your arm. Your eyes widen in horror…your mouth falls open…and then, with your baritone, you go 'Ooooooooooooooo sole mio!'"

Sherlock's eyes narrowed. _Baritone? Preposterous. _"What goes on in that mind of yours…"

"I bet you'll sound marvelous," John smiled sweetly, "what with your violin playing and the intonation. How come you've never serenaded with your voice? I've never heard you sing. That's it, Sherlock, I'm putting that on my bucket list. 'Get Sherlock to sing a song'. Something from Schubert's Swan Songs—no, wait, no, Beatles! You're singing the Beatles. God knows I haven't heard a good Beatles song ever since I could still do surgery."

"…Shut up." _What are the Beatles anyway?_

The screaming, or rather, singing, stopped; whatever procedure was being conducted in that room apparently over with. John and Sherlock looked at each other, before turning aside and laughing.

"Seriously," John said a minute later, "I think you're about to go stir-crazy. This is horrible. You should go. It's not like I'm going anywhere."

"Lestrade knows I'm not taking cases."

"He's not going to volunteer, but you can always ask."

"Do you want me to leave?" Sherlock snapped, suddenly irritated.

"That's not what I said."

"Then shut up!"

John's version of shutting up came in the form of taking a nap. Which did make Sherlock feel extremely bored. An hour later, he pestered John to talk to him while everyone else was eating dinner.

"You should eat," John said to Sherlock.

"I'm not hungry."

John looked at him. "Sherlock," he said in that kind voice he used with the sort of weak folk Sherlock never had the patience for. "What's the matter?"

"What do you mean 'what's the matter'?"

"I can tell something's bothering you."

Sherlock glared at him. _What do you think?_

"You've been cooped up here with me, in this sick environment with lots of MRSA and C diff floating around. If you don't get out of here, you _might _actually become psychotic" John stated. "And I think I'm stable enough that I won't die if you head to the cafeteria to get something to eat."

"The cafeteria is a death trap."

"True. All cafeterias are. Nevertheless, there's no reason for you to suffer here with me," he raised his hand where the needle was taped to his skin. "What are you afraid of?"

_That we are running out of time. That this surgery really does nothing, as you said. That if I leave you even for a moment, that is time lost, time I'll never get back, time I won't learn something about you or be there for you and if I ever learn that I wasn't there when I could have been I will regret it it will be more than I can bear more than I can bear—_

"I'm not _afraid _of anything," Sherlock spat, hoping that he inserted enough disdain that John would drop the subject.

John took a deep breath and blew it out, as if trying to exhale his irritation.

"This is not okay," he said to Sherlock.

_No. Of course it is not bleeding okay._

"You need to eat. I'm tired of your dumb face. Go get something and when you come back here, I'll give you a case."

Sherlock scowled at the comment about his face, but then frowned, puzzled, at the last remark. "A case?"

"Patient case," John smirked. "Get that detective brain of yours to some basic stretching while you rot in here with me."

"Stretching," Sherlock blinked, dubious.

John shrugged. "It's a new game we can try. Used to love these as a med student, and I remember a fair number of interesting cases during my residency. Not so much my military career, since those tend to be pretty straightforward, but I might be able to think of something from the surgery if you get the hell out of here for a moment."

_What? _But Sherlock was intrigued. _John, _giving him a case?

It was enough for him to leave, if only so he could hurry back.

* * *

><p>"Back when we first started to see patients and integrate our lectures into the real world, we use to do these kind of mock patient encounters. I'm the patient, and you're the doctor. I tell you the chief complaint, whether I'm a man or a woman, and how old I am. You can either ask me how I'm supposed to look to you, ask me the questions you'd ask a real patient, and then ask me what my findings are on physical exam. You then tell me your differential, in the order of likelihood, and then what tests you would run to narrow it down."<p>

"…So I'm the doctor, and you're the patient." _What on earth is this?_

"Yes."

Sherlock was lost. It was not a feeling he got often, and definitely not one he liked. "You realize I have not had any medical training."

"You fool around with cadavers and steal my textbooks enough that I think this can work. This way, you can say the sorts of stuff to the patient without getting punched by a real one. Like 'Of course you're short of breath, you refuse to quit smoking like a moron.' Hint hint."

"Nicotine patches, John." _Seriously._

"Cigarette breath, Sherlock. Honestly, for someone who values his senses so much, you don't seem to value your sense of smell and taste, and don't give me lip about how they're not relevant, because I can name at least five cases where your sense of smell led you to the perp, so shut it."

"…" Sherlock had no comeback, because John had a point.

As if taking a cue, John smiled. "I'm a fifty-five-year-old male with abdominal pain."

Sherlock blinked. And blinked again.

"…This is stupid."

"This was a real case. I remember it. A bunch of them. This happens often enough that multiple patients have similar demographics. Think you can figure out what's going on?"

"How am I supposed to figure out what's going on? There are a million things that can cause you abdominal pain."

"What, is the great Sherlock Holmes stumped when literally every doctor in the world starts off at this point?"

"But…I can't work with that!"

"Then ask. What do you need?"

"…"

"It's okay. It's kind of disorienting when a case is presented this way. I'll give you a hint: ask what I look like."

"…This is idiotic."

"Sherlock Holmes is dumber than a med student—which is pretty low, you know, because med students are fucking dumb."

_Ugh. _"_Fine_. What do you look like?"

"I'm a black man, plump, in a gown, wearing only my pants underneath. I'm curled up, looking like I'm really in pain."

"…?"

"Oh Dr. Holmes," John exclaimed in a falsetto, which Sherlock was _certain _his patient did not use, "my stomach is killing me—" he switched to his normal voice to say: "Stomach is the layman's term for abdomen, by the way—"

"I know that!"

"Just saying. Doctor, please help me!"

_What. The. Hell. _"…This is the most inane thing I've ever seen." _And I've seen some idiotic things._

"Doctor, I don't know what's going on, it started this morning after I ate one of those awful cheeseburgers from McDonalds! This guy actually said that."

"You have gallstones."

"Good thought, but that's not the only thing I might have. You have the funniest 'what the fuck' expression, by the way. I don't think I've ever seen it before."

_That's because this game makes absolutely no sense. _"I don't understand the purpose of this."

"I'm giving you a puzzle."

"You're acting like a buffoon."

"Sherlock, for once in your life, follow my lead! This is part of any physician's training. It teaches you how to think like a doctor. It's how _I _think. You're always wondering what goes on in the heads around you. This is how _my _head works."

It was a good point, and despite himself, Sherlock was willing to go along with this, because for the first time since his surgery, John seemed to have energy. Although Sherlock was completely thrown by the current scenario: John, posing as someone who was not _John, _asking Sherlock to observe without being in the position to see or sense _anything_.

"You have a million possible causes. Narrow it down by asking questions. Go on."

"…Where is his pain, even?"

"It's on both sides and stretches around to my back."

"Both sides of…"

"Upper quadrants."

"And wraps around to your back."

"I can see that mind turning. You're getting it. What are you thinking now?"

Sherlock thought back to all the textbooks he would steal from John to peruse over. A lot of things caused abdominal pain. A lot of things radiated to the back. How was he supposed to select any particular _one_?

"Pancreatitis?" Inflammation of the pancreas could present with pain that traveled to the back. Sherlock thought he had deleted this fact, but perhaps not. He might try to delete it later.

"Acute pancreatitis, good thought. You mentioned gallstones. What else can this be?"

"…I don't know enough to say."

John smirked. "Then ask."

Sherlock blinked.

"Oh and doc, can you give me some Zofran? I've been throwing up everything I eat."

_Pancreatitis can cause nausea along with abdominal pain. But so can gallstones. What else can cause nausea? _"Gastritis?"

"Stomach inflammation. You bet. What else in the stomach can cause abdominal pain and nausea?"

"In the stomach? Peptic ulcers?"

"Very good. Now, think back to your anatomy. What else is in your abdomen?"

"…your bowels, your liver, your spleen."

John nodded like he was waiting for Sherlock to continue.

"…your bladder." _Though those are lower._

"Good. What else?"

"…your kidneys."

"Uh-huh. You're getting it. You're smarter than a med student." Sherlock rolled his eyes. "Retroperitoneum. What else?"

"…those are the only organs."

"Full organs, yes. But there are other structures in your abdomen. Kind of between your abdomen and back."

When John told him the answer, Sherlock wanted to hit himself.

"Of course! The aorta! There's always something! So you're saying an aortic aneurysm can cause this. But abdominal aortic aneurysms shouldn't cause nausea."

"Mmhmm." John's eyes grew keen. "You see, for you, you can't theorize without data, so you collect all the data until you're absolutely sure. You _know_. But in medicine, you can't get data without theorizing first. You do a lot of things in order to acquire data, Sherlock. You lie. You cheat. You even hurt people, even if it's minor. But in medicine, when a patient is sick, you can't be that liberal. If you go ahead without a plan, you subject the patient to unnecessary tests, unnecessary radiation, you cut open things that cause scarring and other sequelae later and you end up making your patient sicker, just to high-five yourself when you get the answer. Not good. So you have to have a theory first. That is our differential. You theorize first, and you consider which of these theories you absolutely _have _to address: the common ones, and the ones that kill you—ie the ones you don't want to miss. Then you look for your data along those lines to see if something confirms or rules anything out. Once you cannot narrow any further, _then _you plan tests, until you reach a point where the management would be the same for whatever you have left. Abdominal pain. Can be a million things. Sudden abdominal pain. Probably not cancer, then, although there are exceptions to everything, of course, but cancer would be lower on your differential. Upper abdominal pain—that narrows it down. This is probably not appendicitis. This is probably not cystitis—bladder inflammation. Nausea—this is probably not an abdominal aortic aneurysm, or a triple A. What can it be? Any of the remainder. And you don't always _know_, for sure, and you have to leave it at that. But if you can afford to, you think about what you must include, what you can spare, and you _always _think about what would happen if you're _wrong_, and whether you can afford to be. You know why I'm a good conductor of light for you?"

Sherlock blinked, feeling like he was seeing John's world for the very first time through his eyes. He looked at his friend, who was smiling at him in triumph.

"Because I am the opposite of you," John stated, and pointed from his head to Sherlock's, and winked.

* * *

><p><em>5-6-2011 19:24<br>_

_Fairly normal day at the surgery, although there was one patient, Julian Moore, that I'm worried about. She presented 3 mo ago with joint pain and fatigue. I thought at first that this might be fibromyalgia, but it didn't fit; she didn't seem like the anxious type, and I think her knees were actually swollen—it's a bit hard to tell because she's a big girl. After 3 months, she's gotten a little better, but something's not right with her. I sent her blood in, and she had a low white count: 3.8, hemoglobin was 12, although she's pre-menopausal so I'm not worried about that (she's 34) and platelets were normal, 156. That white count bothered me though, so I ordered complements and ANA. She had normal complements but a positive ANA titer, so I referred her to Dr. Michel in rheumatology, but other than the ANA, rheumatoid factor, and CRP, nothing else has been positive. She didn't seem rheumatoid to me, and Dr. Michel agreed, but none of her labs have shown what it could be. Some kind of mixed syndrome? We're missing something, I know it, but I can't really do much more on my end because rheum is definitely not my area._

_Sherlock has been silent all day, as far as I can tell. Thinking about something or another, even though we don't have an active case. He's probably talking to me in his head again and ordering me around. It's so weird; he doesn't do this to anyone else. I've never seen him talk to Lestrade, or Mrs. Hudson. Should I be flattered? I can't fathom. Some parts of him I feel like I fully understand. I remember during medical school, I hated group-studying because I felt like everyone slowed me down. The more people in a study group, the slower the session gets, because everyone had to be brought up to speed, and there is nothing as frustrating as having to tutor someone who stubbornly cannot get it. It cut into my time, and sometimes I can't afford it. Sherlock is easily a hundred times worse, and I can imagine someone like him never belonged. With a proud brother like Mycroft, no wonder Sherlock is always trying to find his own path. But he's very blind to himself, that Sherlock. Everything he does is reactionary, which is actually a little unexpected, given how much control he exerts over anywhere he's present in, but his personality and character is developed as an answer to other people's perceptions of him. Mycroft is one way, so Sherlock makes himself someone else. Others find him bizarre, so Sherlock makes himself not care. I think he's been getting better with social interaction simply because I'm always expecting better of him, even when he proves me wrong. I guess everyone is a product of their environment, to some degree, but I wonder if Sherlock was aware. He has always been his own weakness, and when it comes to his own person, he is woefully stupid. But then, he's also the type of person who would know this and not care. After all, if a person must have a weakness, what better one than himself?  
><em>

_I'm repeating myself, but I'm still baffled as to why Sherlock bothers with me at all. He's clearly got his funds to have this flat to himself, and I doubt I do anything he couldn't do on his own. Maybe he just wants company; he is human, after all, no matter what people like Donovan say, but it's so strange to think that he chose me. Some days I wake up and I still feel the loss. I don't know whether I'd be more of a person or less of one, if I were still a surgeon. I was so proud of myself, and perhaps just plain proud. But I had worked so hard. Other military surgeons could return from the battlefield to continue operating in veterans hospitals. Why couldn't I? But I suppose it's just the luck of the draw. Just like I might be one for Sherlock. At least for now. _

_I wonder what it says of me, that I'm willing to put up with such ridiculous shit to be friends with a man who likely thinks I'm beneath him. I haven't felt this way, this inferiority, since residency, when there was hope of moving up, but I can never match Sherlock's brilliance and he will probably never respect me as much as he respects himself. To think, I used to despise vapid fans, and here I am, the biggest fan-boy of Sherlock Holmes, willing to bend backwards for this idiot until I kill myself for him. Not like I haven't come close many times already. I'm like the Sancho Panza to his Don Quijote. The world has never seen a bigger cretin than John Watson._

_I hear him calling. Wonder if Lestrade had called him. Hopefully we get back in time for me to catch a full 8 hours. God, I can't believe I use to sleep an average of 3. That's one part of the army I don't miss. —John Watson_

* * *

><p>The next day, John swooned while ambulating. Sherlock caught him, stunned and dismayed. John's body was light; he was missing some organs, after all, but he folded to Sherlock like a frail sheet of paper, all skinny limbs. John woke a minute later, alert and oriented but nauseated, and he vomited for the first time.<p>

The nurses were kind, and the surgeon came to see him again, rubbing his nape in a camaraderie Sherlock could not share.

"You can't go bench pressing with the orthopedicians just yet, Doctor."

"Pfft. I was hobbling while leaning on my mate."

"I know, but just take it easy, because when your blood pressure goes down, my blood pressure goes up, and you know that doesn't balance out."

"God, my patients never passed out."

"I don't believe that. Some of them had to have passed out."

"Yeah, but none of them were in the fucking army."

"Come now, Dr. Watson," the surgeon remonstrated, "you know it doesn't work like that. You know that. This is not a sign of weakness. It's nothing to be ashamed of. Besides, we've all fainted over less. How many times have you passed out just because you skipped lunch?"

Sherlock looked at John.

John grinned. "Oh God, I mean, not that often, but every time I passed out I fell backwards, and since I was always on a footstool, I would hit the back of my head and wake up with a giant bump at the back."

_John has passed out before?_

"Fuck," said the surgeon, shaking his head, "What use is being short if you're going to smack the floor from the same distance anyway?"

"I know, right?"

The other laughed. "You're okay, Dr. Watson."

After he left, John explained, "Pretty much all surgeons pass out in the OR a few times. Prolonged fasting and being on your feet for that long. I was just glad I never fell _into_ the patient. Sterile field." He winced at the thought.

Sherlock tried to imagine a younger John Watson, on his feet since hours before dawn and starving for so long that he would faint while operating. Strangely, his mind made a leap towards being glad that John got shot, because he doubted John ever passed out at the surgery.

John was still thinking about what the surgeon said, and was chuckling to himself. "Man, I think I passed out three times when I was a resident, and actually once in the army. It happened when I was sick. Ian held the record when I was a resident; he passed out four times. We did tease him about being weak, but my med students have passed out, my interns. Man, and every time I had to complete the fall. One of my med students fell on top of the circulator once, so she never hit anything. She could have stuck around, technically, but we sent her to get food. I wished someone would send me to get food, back then. Wished we could snack in the OR. Although I wasn't always hungry when I was operating on someone. Having something to do helps you forget that your legs are aching and you have not eaten breakfast and it's fifteen hundred in the afternoon already."

"Ridiculous, all of you," Sherlock rolled his eyes.

"You're the one to talk, Mr. Everything-Else-Is-Transport."

Sherlock did not reply, because John's transport was trying to kill him, and he suddenly wondered if John could have avoided all of this if he took better care of himself during his youth. It was a nonsensical thought; he knew logically that plenty of surgeons had gone through the ordeals and never had to deal with cancer.

But the thought led to other what-ifs: what if John had been hurt because of something Sherlock had brought back from the lab? He was always complaining about how the kitchen was unhygienic, that Sherlock would place formaldehyde-soaked eyeballs next to the milk. Formaldehyde was a carcinogen. What if Sherlock had given John cancer?

"Hey," John murmured, "what are you thinking about?"

_It is too late now, and might be besides the point, _Sherlock looked back at his _friend-colleague-partner-brother-heart_.

"Nothing."

* * *

><p><em>9-4-2003, 2:05<br>_

_Today was hectic. Nora had a massive headache in the middle of one operation, so she's been a bit slow about following my orders. I yelled at her and probably stressed her out, but then I'm stressed out, and I think I've done worse to her. I apologized later, but if I wake up to a slit throat though, I'd know why._

_Had a lot of emergent cases today. Medics just kept bringing them in. Some days it seems endless, and today it's one of those days. There's nothing like saving a man's life when he was on the brink of death, but today feels like I'm just scrubbing in just to watch people die on the table. Why am I even bothering? And this business in Afghanistan is full of shit. So full of shit. If I weren't saving the lives of men who were good on the inside and just forced to do stupid shit by the fuckers up above, I'd find some way out of this bleeding contract. And I can't even complain to the others, because you don't badmouth your bosses. But I wish we could, because I'm a fucking doctor and I didn't exactly get this degree in order to just receive orders. Now these poor kids are dead, and what did they die for? But I can't say it out loud, and I'll have to be satisfied with saying it here, where no one will know. This is absurd. Why did I join the army, where the government treats us like shit they can just discard when it's convenient? I'm mental. We're all mental. And to think, I was already doubly cracked considering I decided to go to medical school and surgery. And then army. God, I'm triply cracked. Triple whammy. We're all fucked._

_Though the day did end on a calmer note, at least. It started off with bowel perfs and aortic ruptures, so we couldn't talk about anything other than the case. I was fast though! I found one bowel laceration in 3 minutes. I just randomly suctioned the shit and it popped up to say hi to me. That was fantastic. After that, I was on fire. Although one lac was a nightmare. 22-yo Jeremy Harvey. He had a giant load of adhesions! He had a lap appy apparently, and I'm surprised he didn't have a bowel obstruction yet, because those scars were all over the place, waiting to squeeze those intestines. This is why people should not preemptively remove their appendix. But the end of the day was pretty calm; last five patients were hemodynamically stable, so their ex-laps were relatively relaxed.  
><em>

_Several people got crushed by falling debris as I was signing off. I don't think any amount of saline's going to save them, because there is no way their muscles didn't just explode. Their going to flood their kidneys like a motherfucker, and I really hope that when that happens, I'm not on call again. Knowing my luck, that's going to happen right as I wake up. Scott owes me a good joke if that happens.  
><em>

_Damn, I think we're getting shot at. I hear things and hearing things is not good. Need to take a look. —John Watson_

_2:15_

_We were getting shot at, but they took care of it. No one got hurt. Which wouldn't matter to me anyway, because I'm not on call. _

_Let me see, who did I operate on today? Well, during the day, which is more like yesterday. Warren Lay was my first case; 23 yo M who had the nicest ginger curls; he's one of the rare gingers whose hair is actually red as opposed to whatever orange-brown hue normal gingers have. And he has an awesome last name; best of luck to that fellow. (Oh yeah! I went there!) Bowel perf, but stabilized, and was hanging out by the time I signed off. _

_Joel Burns, 21 yo M, aortic rupture; he was pretty much destined to die by the time they brought him to the base, exsanguinated on the table and I barely cut into him. Man, I was just like 'whatever' and moved on to Sam Danvers. What does that say about me? Though at this point in my career, I can tell when something's a lost cause. Fucking aortas. You don't mess with that shit. But Danvers was the one where I found the lac in 3 minutes; we barely had to suction any of the shit before I found it. He was also 21, I think. Brain is kind of slowing. _

_Mike Houston had a pneumo, did a needle thoracostomy on him before putting a chest tube in. That one was pretty easy too. And then Harvey, with all the adhesions; I think he should be discharged because I have a feeling those adhesions will return with a vengeance. _

__Hugh James, 22 yo, aortic rupture and died even before we moved him to the table. I made myself work on him for 10 minutes but he wasn't resuscitable._ I could have done fuck about that. The last few were all ex-laps; Henry Smith, 19 yo M with sickle cell trait, had problems pissing at one point and I kind of wonder why he's here. Afghanistan's not really the setting if you can't concentrate your pee. I'm just a dumb doc though, and I guess comfort's not really high on the agenda when you're sending your underlings to their deaths. Anyway, Smith was an ex-lap, and we found a mild abdominal bleed, no perforations, so he's sitting down there now. _

_Fred Darcy, 20 yo M with Gilbert's, I don't know what he's doing here either, I feel like the army should have screened him out. I mean, Gilbert's is pretty asymptomatic, but Afghanistan's not exactly low-stress. I guess he just has to look a little jaundiced for a while, though. Maybe he thinks he'd look hip. Yellow is the new Black. Wait, that totally sounded less racist when it was just in my head. Damn it, I wrote this with pen…oh well, no one's looking in this journal, anyhow. I'm taking this as my cue to go the fuck to sleep. Hopefully I don't mess up in front of the nurses come morning. You don't mess with nurses! —John Watson_

* * *

><p>The day John passed gas was more exciting than it should have been. The incident itself had gone by unnoticed by Sherlock, and he only learned of it when John announced it to his surgeon.<p>

"Why didn't you tell me?" He exclaimed, dismayed that he had missed what was a milestone in post-operation patients.

John gave him a look like he had lost his mind. "…What? Why…? It's a fart. I'm not going to…" he burst into laughter. "Sherlock, you are the most absurd lunatic to ever grace this planet."

"But if you passed gas, that means we can go home."

"They need to make sure I can tolerate PO first."

Tolerating PO, _per os_, meaning "by mouth", turned out to be a slow drag of testing water and ice, before moving up to clear liquids.

"There's research that says this is unnecessary," John told Sherlock, "and that I should just eat whatever I want without going through this gradation, but doctors tend toward tradition pretty often, and it's harmless in the long run."

Sherlock disagreed, because instead of being able to arrive home at 221B by noon, the whole process swept them past breakfast (where John had water) and lunch (where John had clears). He spent that time texting Mycroft irritably about the trying ordeal, texting Lestrade about John's impending discharge, while John hobbled like an old man, watched crap telly, and slept like the world's most boring patient. They did another case, where John pretended he was a thirty-year-old woman who turned out to have scleroderma _sine _scleroderma, or "scleroderma without scleroderma" (what the hell?) and medicine, as Sherlock was starting to realize, is as unpredictable as Moriarty.

Then finally, _finally_, they got the discharge paperwork. Sherlock was so eager to leave, he dressed John for John. John, because he had always possessed the patience of a saint where Sherlock was concerned, allowed this with no argument. He might have sensed Sherlock's need to be useful, to do something for him, bless the man. In fact, considering John's independence and sense of pride and virtue, he was being very accommodating to everyone involved, nothing at all like the sort of patients doctors were notorious for being.

Mycroft came in person to escort the two home. In the black car, the fat git had the decency to keep his trap shut. He did offer to help John out of the car like a pompous idiot, but Sherlock took care of that easily, without even needing to glare. Though John murmured his gratitude, perhaps forgetting that Mycroft never did anything without an ulterior motive. Thankfully, he departed before Sherlock helped John climb the stairs, though this time John protested that he could manage them.

They opened the door to 221B to find the room full of flowers.

John gaped, eyes sweeping through the well-wishes, the baskets, the laces around the green stems. The room was actually covered; the floors were completely obscured, and there was overflow up to the tables and even the couch and chairs. On the kitchen counter, roses and carnations bloomed next to Sherlock's mold and yeast. One large handwriting read: _Dear Dr. Watson: Hope you get well soon! We would be lost without you to blog all of your adventures! _Another was clearly from a patient, stating: _Doc, We need you. Hope you're out of the hospital quick! Missing you in the meantime!_

It was not like John to care for the feelings of strangers, but next to Sherlock, standing at the doorway to their home, the doctor was noticeably moved.

"Well," he said, looking at Sherlock, eyes moist. "I guess I should update my blog, asap."

Sherlock looked back at the room. "I'm using all of these for my experiments."


End file.
